This week's edition of The Reducer was an Eamon Dunphy special, as we looked back on an unparalleled 40-year career with RTE.
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So how best to sum up Dunphy's RTE career?
Here are each of our respective attempts, beginning with Potential Spin Doctor For The DUP, Seamas O'Reilly.
I think he likes to set himself as having a common man's ethos, a vaguely left of centre outlook in terms of man vs the machine of government whether that be the actual government, the political system, the bosses at RTE, the bosses at FIFA, whatever. He's against the bosses so long as he can define the bosses.
He still cultivates this air of being on the outside, with his back against the wall, kicking against the pricks.
He is less a rebel without a cause than he is a rebel without a point. What's the point? What is he trying to say?
Gavin (er, me) agreed that if he is a left-leaning, he is a Marxist. Of a kind.
If he is left-leaning he does subscribe to the teachings of Marx, but it's Groucho Marx: 'If you don't like these principles, I have others'.
The point is, to quote a famous line he said to Graeme Souness ten years ago, to 'stay alive for 63 and a half years baby.
The point is to remain relevant.
Elsewhere in the show, we considered Dunphy's valedictory comments on social media. The day after Dunphy announced his exit from RTE, he wrote a column in the Star in which he raged against the influence of social media.
"Social media would have done for me. Executives now take notice of social media and what is being said. It is one of the evils of modernity. It puts down anyone who has a contrarian view. Anyone who has their own mind is immediately a target. Many of the people running media organisations today pay attention to it. It is a vicious, ignorant, dark world. It is a vicious tool in the wrong hands".
These comments got short shrift on the podcast. Seamas:
His entire point is laughable. He is complaining about people having contrarian views against him? It doesn't make sense. What he's worried about, I think, is losing his monopoly on mad opinions that are listened to by people at high levels.
Bear in mind that this is the guy who has defined himself as being 'that guy in the room that will say what everyone else is thinking'. Well, unfortunately, he has learned that not everybody thinks the same as him. Now they have a tiny little microphone. He can't define himself as the voice of the masses and then get annoyed when the horrible masses get themselves a keyboard.
In aggregate, a thousand people saying that 'you shouldn't have said that nasty shit', the Director of Prgrammes at RTE probably does have a responsibility to listen to them. It might be easier for them to do that with a keyboard that it used to be to write a letter, the ease with which they can do it doesn't make the offence they have taken less valid.
Elsewhere on the show, we run through some of the best bits, dig up a rare clip of an, eh, enthusiastic Dunphy being chided on air by Dermot Morgan and ask the ultimate question: Were our lives improved by having Eamon Dunphy talking about football on television?
Listen in for the answers.
Get in touch with the show by tweeting @TheReducerPod or email [email protected]
